dsayers

We live in a society that treats these people as if they're in a different moral category. Can you imagine ANY scenario where his bodyguards could've killed your friend and suffered ANY consequences for it? If he was in the forest and saw a grizzly bear, would he try to get its attention and rationalize with it? Can you imagine ANY scenario where his interaction with Mr. Clinton could've resulted in ANY step away from slavery or towards freedom? We experience anxiety as a motivator. It is important for our own health and well-being that we manage our anxieties in productive ways. I think your friend behaved in a way that is not consistent with self-preservation. Please keep in mind that I'm not judging from atop an ivory tower here. I was once in a nearly identical situation and I played it wrong also.

I thought your recount seemed heavily editorialized. This part here is downright manipulative. Flipping somebody off is not retreating. It is something that is done with intent to harm. Physical/not physical isn't relevant; You were using your sister's sense of sight and emotional investment as a weapon against her. Was her retaliation with physical violence comparable in scope? I don't know, but I can't qualify it as the INITIATION of the use of force. You don't have to keep somebody in your life just because of their genetic ties to you. I also know that it's easier to repair an established relationship than it is to form a new one. I don't know what your relationship was with her before, but I don't think it would be inappropriate for you to initiate contact with her and lead by apologizing for provoking her. If she continues to maintain her position of not apologizing to you, at least you will have settled your own debt to her. Which I anticipate would make the decision to not allow her in you life to be a less conflicting one.

I'm glad you posted again in this thread. Thanks to the moderation bug, this post hadn't appeared to me before when that portion of the thread was fresh. I reject your supposition that it has to be one or the other. I don't know where the communications breakdown is. I suspect that part of the reason I don't understand is BECAUSE I don't see the relevance. Which I feel I was clear about. From my perspective, the discussion of whether a chair is objective is being obfuscated by somebody bringing up that our perception of it is subjective. I feel I was clear about that also. If I thought that input was clarifying rather than obfuscating, I would be more incentivized to understand it. I was willing to override this interpretation because I know you are more researched and practiced in these areas and trusted that if I didn't see the relevance, it might be some component or consideration I wasn't privy to. If you want me to try harder, explain how it is relevant instead of deflecting by saying that YOUR communication is MY responsibility. If "theft, assault, rape, and murder is immoral" (I never mentioned UPB; see above obfuscation) is an objective claim and an accurate overview of morality, then how does saying things like epistemic vs ontological, morality EXISTS, and morality is subjective at all helpful? And how do you classify that as a bad question?

I was having dinner with a friend/mentor/boss last night. During a conversation, it came up that voting was taking place the next day. He could tell by my reaction that this was news to me. He asked, "You're not registered to vote?" I said, "Absolutely not. I don't have the right to threaten and tell other people to do, so I cannot give that right to other people." He had nothing to say in response. In contrast, a bit later, I was telling him about how my father has a woodpile that he will likely never make use of and how this contrasts with my father's fear of insect infestation. My friend responded by telling me how wood should be stacked for maximum dryness. I wasn't sure where that came from and he quickly revealed that he wasn't either. We had entered into a debate which I will spare you the details of. The takeaway for me was that the debate on how to stack wood for maximum dryness served as a contrast of his unwillingness to explore the possibility that voting is the initiation of the use of force. He used to be in the marines and currently benefits from VA-provided health care, but he accepts that most of what the State does is wrong. He's a good friend and a gentle man in general, but it bothers me that our conversations can never be about serious issues. I wanted to see what other people thought about how to approach this with him moving forward.

That wouldn't be similar at all. Person A choosing to not give their property to person B doesn't say anything about the relationship that person B has with that property other than they don't own it. Who has ever denied that humans requires sustenance to survive? I think you're mincing concepts here also. 2+2=4 is an absolute claim. If you can find any scenario where 2+2!=4, then 2+2=4 is logically false. Is this what you mean by universailty rule? "For an absolute claim to be true it must be true absolutely" has nothing to do with consent. We don't need to consider consent to understand that a square triangle is false because something cannot have 3 sides and 4 sides simultaneously. "Give to the poor if you can" is internally inconsistent because the person putting forth the proposition is accepting their own self-ownership while rejecting the self-ownership of the intended giver. When I said that consent is the only condition that matters, it was in the context of utilizing property, not checking for universality. It just so happens that your particular command of consideration dispenses with consent, which is how we know it violates property right and therefore also violates universality. That the two occur together in this specific example is linked, but incidental. I never suggested that in order for 2+2=4 to be true, we must consent to it.

How? Ownership begins with self. What you do with your body, time, and effort is yours also. Ownership is inherently exclusive. You can give, share, and lend, but you cannot have an identical claim of ownership over something with somebody else. You could voluntarily enter into a contract in an attempt to do so, but you would literally have to conceive of every possible scenario of competing claims with regards to that property, which is impossible. We wouldn't want shared ownership to be true either. Maintenance, overhead, "the cost of doing business," etc are unfortunate side effects of property ownership. If shared ownership were valid, no participating party would be incentivized to engage in this expense/investment. The more people that supposedly share ownership and the less incentive you'd have to do so. I think it's called the tragedy of the commons.

Who is 1920s China in the year 2014? How is lending made up money to a fictional character representative of an actual debt? Isn't that like putting your money on black at the roulette wheel, it comes up red, and you think you're owed the money that you risked? The national debt says that my productivity was owned before I was even born. How can it be legitimate?

No, you don't think people will pay you for one thing you did, so you attach objective terminology to it to avoid facing the possibility that you are in error. I asked you before about how a patent is basically trying to force others not to do what you yourself have done.

@yagami: I think I know what you mean. I think part of the reason why priests, politicians, and other immoral people use the word morality is because they understand it is objective, so anything they claim to be moral cannot be questioned. Kind of like when they call commands laws. They're trying to preempt dissent by using terminology that's inescapable. To understand why morality is objective I think is as simple as accepting that X can not be equal to NOT X (the opposite of itself), which is true independent of individual consciousness. That which is immoral is self-contradictory in that it is the simultaneous acceptance and rejection of property rights. Which means that even if it were subjective, it would still be declared wrong by the people behaving as if its right, removing doubt as to whether it's immoral. Does that help at all?

I think it's all three of these. Abusers isolate their victims to reduce the risk of their victims escaping or their abuse being understood. Conclusions are inflicted rather than rational thought being taught for example. So to some extent, it's that they literally don't comprehend the language of rational thought. Then there are those that do but immediately reject it to in order to manage their anxiety. We're born into a world we understand and as we grow up, we filter out certain things that aren't necessary to our survival for efficiency's sake. To face that what we understood to be our world was fallacious and even malicious can invoke a very strong biological imperative to survive. Then there are some of those with the fortitude to overcome that step that will reject it because of the social implications. As for why, it's just a repeat of the last paragraph, though less primal and more conscious decision. This is why I would argue that the State is not a rational conclusion, but sheer momentum of the past. This is why it's so very important that we change the world by living our values. We need to make it so that the people in our lives would be very uncomfortable to support and promote aggression. The day will come when it's unfashionable to do so and there you go: free society without bloodshed. What do you think?

Computers are not alive. They don't behave at all.

The contradiction is still there. Whomever issues that edict is simultaneously accepting and rejecting property rights. The only clause/condition that is relevant is consent. This is not necessarily true. Was the swinging of the fist an attempt to strike somebody? Was it an attempt to intimidate somebody? A behavior is only moral if it is binding upon somebody else AND doesn't violate their property rights. If you and I are sparring, then for you to swing at me and miss is moral because the behavior is binding upon me despite missing, but had my consent.

People can travel on roads because they (people and roads) are physical objects. Time is a concept. The idea that we could physically travel through a concept is science-fiction. I think the behavior of arguing for determinism is a performative contradiction. For anybody who truly believed in determinism, it would be determined for them that that trying to convince others, whose minds are already determined, would be a waste of time/effort. It would be like leaping off of a tall building to try to fly in a world where you accepted that people cannot fly; It's just not something they would even consider.

That is like saying that a church is proof that God exists. Parents teach children that God exists, but that doesn't mean it's true. Parents might teach don't hit, but that doesn't mean it's objective or that it's principled. Also, lying is not absolutely wrong either. Our honesty is like anything else we own in that it is given voluntarily and is not owed to anybody else except those whom we've pledged it to. Thank you, Bulbasaur, for articulating my thoughts on Kevin's position.

Is the point that you are making that the same resistance to self-knowledge that allowed for you to choose an unsuitable mate (twice) is motivating you to not consider or answer the questions being asked of you? Do you accept your own capacity for error?

Yeah, if my tire pops, I have to pull over, get dirty, and change it out. That sucks. I totally accept that sometimes we have to do things we don't like. I don't see how this relates to what's being discussed. Unlike a tire popping, who you marry should be as far away from being accidental as possible. Why would you marry somebody that couldn't "get along" with your daughter? Wouldn't that be the biggest deal breaker possible? This still doesn't address why the topic of aggression would be a command from you instead of a conversation. Like I said, I cannot imagine falling in love with or marrying somebody that had the capacity for aggression. In the event that I did make such a mistake, the only way to remedy the situation would be through lovingly working together. "Don't be aggressive!" is itself aggressive, no?

I think I might be as lost as I feel because I fail to see the relevance. Is "theft, assault, rape, and murder is immoral" not an objective claim? Is it not an accurate overview of morality? Look, I trust you know your stuff and I trust that the amount of effort you're putting into it suggests that it's NOT irrelevant. But I really do fail to see how the mental process of opening a door addresses even indirectly the question of whether or not morality is subjective. If I am mistaken, and you'd be willing to elaborate based on this mental block I'm experiencing, I would appreciate that. I'm sorry if this is at all frustrating as I'm not trying to be obtuse.

The only service that the government provides is the threat of violence. Beyond that, they just pay the same private companies that would be doing those things without the State. Remember that the only thing that you can accomplish with violence that you cannot accomplish without violence is violence itself. I think the average person's jaw would drop if they understood how much more money they'd have without every aspect of their life being taxed and how much cheaper most things would be without coercive regulations artificially inflating prices. I would argue that this would lead to LESS of a need for self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency is comparatively inefficient. State violence isolates us for the purpose of incentivizing us to depend on it and/or turn to it for solutions. Without the threat of violence, we'd all be able to work together and specialize in a way that would achieve maximum efficiency. It wouldn't be overnight, but it wouldn't take the sum of human consciousness long to figure out the most efficient ways to meet our collective desires. Coercion is the enemy of innovation.

Sure he does. When he uses his body to communicate to you that he rejects private property, he's accepting the private property that is his body. This is known as a performative contradiction. No. I came to own my car by way of voluntary trade using stored value that I had earned by way of voluntary trade. The fact that the state took some as I earned the money, took some as I spent the money, took some by licensing and regulating that which I spent it on, etc doesn't mean that my ownership of the car is illegitimate. It is true that States have enabled people to come to own things that they did not acquire by voluntary means, but this wouldn't invalidate all property ownership.

Alcohol is one of those things (including water!) that can be beneficial and relatively harmless in moderation, but indescribably destructive in excess. I don't think drinking alcohol in front of children is abusive IF the child is regularly negotiated with, taught to reason, including deferred gratification and moderation. In that context, it's no different than taking an aspirin or any other behavior that one should not engage in wantonly. As with most behaviors, the key ingredient is self-knowledge. WHY are you engaging in behavior X. If you cannot answer that, you should refrain from that behavior as much as possible until you can. It's the only way you can drink (in this context of this thread) responsibly.

Does anybody know what happened to Mishelle? I was gone for a few months a while back, but before I left, she was a great poster who availed herself of the call in show and everything.

Mr. Beal, I'm still struggling with your position. My understanding of the word exist is comprised of matter and energy. For morality to exist subjectively, are you saying that it's comprised of matter and energy within the biochemistry of our brains and since it's OUR brains, that makes it subjective? You say the keyword is exist, but this blurs the conversation for me altogether. Namely in that I don't see morality as existing at all, which has no bearing on its logical validity as an objective observation/summary of the real world. Ownership is inherently exclusionary. You own yourself and therefore you cannot be owned by somebody else. In order for me to use you (exercise ownership over your body), I'd have to override your use of you. For me to use myself to deny you use of yourself would be contradictory. This contradiction I feel is adequate proof that ownership is exclusionary. The behavior of eating an apple IS the acceptance of private property. The person doing the eating is exercising ownership over their body and in turn, the food they are consuming. This is important to understand because like you've done here, I frequently see people talking about property rights/morality as if they're optional or can be avoided. Eating an apple isn't the best example. Since apples occur naturally, the existence of an apple isn't necessarily proof that it belongs to somebody. Your attempt at counterpoint would've been better served using an item that doesn't occur naturally. For all intents and purposes, ethics and morality are the same thing. My understanding as to the difference is that that which is unethical in theory is immoral in practice. To draft a bill for example would be unethical since it would recommend the initiation of the use of force. To vote on and/or enact that bill would be immoral as it would be the initiation of the use of force. What you explain as your understanding of morality, I would describe as empathy. Morality is how you are able to interpret that what happened to the person was a violation, which is why you empathize with the person. For what it's worth, I really appreciate this conversation. It's a topic that I'm enthusiastic about and I really enjoy being able to disagree with and being disagreed with without anybody making it personal. Seems like a rare commodity these days.

I don't know if I follow this. Are you basically saying that a chair is an object, but our experience of that chair is subjective?

Semantics is how they've got you right now. That's why they say laws instead of commands. It's why they say government instead of theft of any aspect of your life they're interested in. The term govern itself is without consent. For example, the Earth's gravitational pull governs the rate at which something falls to the Earth. Humans do not have the power/right to govern other humans because they are not fundamentally different. If you own a restaurant, you can enact a policy such as no shirt, no shoes, no service. But that's because that is YOUR restaurant. In order for government to be valid, it (mind the anthropomorphism) would have have to own all the land it governs as well as everybody on that land. This claim is inherently immoral because it bypasses consent where consent is required. I don't get to say "I own you, but if you don't like that, just tell me." That is immoral because it's the simultaneous acceptance and rejection of property rights. I am not claiming ownership of you, nor you me. We don't have to secede because we've not been forcibly corralled by one another to begin with. THIS is voluntary interaction. Government is predicated on a lack of consent. The debts they create are in fact their way of claiming ownership of humans that don't even exist yet. Are you prepared to argue the unborn's complicity in this arrangement?

But if your way of handling it is to try some emotional tuff stuff, then that IS the way things are done around there, no? Don't get me wrong, forcibly protecting your daughter from aggression is justified. But once the threat is over, why wouldn't you talk to your wife like an equal? "Outsider" is a very provocative term and one I don't think should be used towards somebody you love. Also, isn't this the sort of thing that should be identified and agreed upon BEFORE getting married? Lastly, I just wanted to say that I disagree with her not being a parent. You have a "child" (especially one that lives with you), if you choose to remarry, that person is now a parent also. At 15 years old, the parenting's pretty much done anyways, so perhaps a bit of a moot point. I just wanted to emphasize the error in isolating your wife as well as the error in exposing your 15 year old to somebody that doesn't already accept property rights and the personhood of "children." You won't be able to make a difference by inflicting this conclusion upon your wife, nor will it be as effective coming after the fact instead of being an integral part of the proverbial price of admission.